Being Yoga Podcast Ep. 31 : Interview with Martha Eddy | Elisa Jouannet

hello everybody I'm so thrilled to have Marta Eddie today for this new season of the B yoga podcast it's such a pleasure to have you back and to share again you know like around all those very meaningful topics that we will explore in this season and I'm opening up with you today Marta so thank you for uh receiving and accepting the invitation to share your wisdom it is such a pleasure to be here thank you so much so before we dive into all the gifts and offerings and and really understandings that you collected through the years I would invite you to maybe facilitate a lending practice so that everyone including myself can be centered and present for the interview absolutely I'm so thankful for that as well becoming centered is part of being so um I was enjoying the idea of how do we deepen our listening and I'd like to encourage us to First relax our eyes and then come into exploring our hearing and then how we move from hearing into listening so I am closing my eyes right now I am inviting you to either um place your hands your elbows on a table in front of you or on your lap or just lift your arms to your eyes and palm and palming means putting the heel of your hand on your cheekbones and crossing your fingers over your forehead and cupping your hands so there's no pressure on your eyeballs so the eyelids are down you're starting to breathe more deeply you're noticing what's in your visual field for instance it really ideally is black giving our eyes what they need in order to be Fuller receivers of light so the retina the back of the eye that absorbs photons light particles or waves comes into a deeper place of receptivity with Darkness periods of relaxation and then when the light comes in there's more activity in the pigment the ropson so as you breathe in you might even breathe in more deeply through the upper part of your nose the canals we call them the various little kind of like shell-like structures so that you're breathing into the area around the Bony orbit of the eye in other words the part of the nose and the bones behind the nose that Connect into the eye socket massaging your eyes and just take one one or two more breaths slowing down your [Music] exhale enjoying the darkness the relaxation the easiness of your breath the massaging of your abdomen by your diaphragm and now bring a little awareness to your cheekbones and know that your inner ear the part of your ear that hears different tones and pitches that makes connections to different sounds is behind this cheekbone this zygomatic bone where your palm is resting so by giving a little pressure to to that eye bone you're helping the Bony orbit the lower part of your eye socket but also perhaps speaking to your inner and middle ear your outer ear is your earlobe and the entry way of sound vibration your middle ear is taking that vibration and transmitting it with a drum into the CIA the snail that has so many nerve fibers that's going to send messages to the brain through the midbrain to the auditory cortex so there's sound and there's meaning so perhaps right now you just listen to the sound of my Voice Low sounds reverberating deep into the ca higher sounds High hello [Music] higher sounds coming in a little differently and then there's the meaning of these sounds these words perhaps they don't have meaning for you perhaps it's just the sound that you're enjoying or the interpretation of the words perhaps my choice of words wants to be clarified cleared for you my choice of words could be working very well or could be confusing so just notice the language and how your brain is perceiving that from the inner ear through the tones through the vibrations to the meaning of language the interpretations the perceptions and then gradually keeping your eyelids lowered if you will I invite you to move your hands away still hearing my voice and the changes in pitch and volume but now relaxing your shoulders your hands and maybe moving your head and neck or your spine and imagining you're some animal favorite animal of yours whether it's a little bird or a puppy or some other wonderful being that is listening for a sound and perks up its ears and you perk up your ears and then soften your ears relaxing so it's as if you're searching like trying to discriminate a particular sound like what is that where is that coming from or just being with it without any sense of it needing to mean anything or needing to give you information and just notice the tone of your head on your neck the tone of your neck over your rib cage your breathing your diaphragm your pelvis if you're sitting on the floor maybe over your thighs on the chair or if you happen to be standing or lying down just noticing how the rest of your body is taking in sound and choosing to perceive what the sound means to you or not and maybe let's end with a little hum each of us humming on our own and feeling the vibration of sound so our bones are Awakening as well perhaps you feel that right now just listening this is to exaggerate that feeling of stimulating the ear with sound through the bones of our whole body so play with pitch low middle and high and let's [Music] begin so just short just noticing maybe do that one more time and then we'll come to our ending [Music] [Music] [Music] and finding your ending with either a sound or a movement or just gently lightly fluttering your eyes [Music] open being the animal that you are in the environment you're in and just taking in any sounds you're hearing of the outside from the inside orienting yourself to be able to listen to this conversation and perhaps first clearing by taking a moment to stretch or write down something that was important for you from what we just did so I'll just be quiet for 10 seconds and welcome back thank you thank you very much there are so many um maybe thoughts but feelings that came up really and uh e code what I'm interested in these days like Eco poetry maybe you've heard about yeah this uh kind of world really that I'm discovering and like decentering from the only humans Vision to other animals or even uh vegetables visions and how how does like a rose spend their day and what are they seeing hearing listening to and that's uh such an experience Ian a very profound one and and when you offer to to embody and to to tune into the the feeling and the felt sense of how is that to be the animal that you like like wow yeah very very powerful sweet I um I can't remember the year but I think it was the somewhere between 2005 and a a program I was involved with 2007 called seeds and I wish I could remember how that acronym goes but it definitely had to do with ecological uh the word two e had the word ecological in it it was a festival at Earth dance which is a site that I have gone to for years and run both workshops for moving on Center our School in California Oakland as well as for my own Dynamic embodiment somatic movement therapy trainings in this case they were doing a festival on working with ecology and the D is dance so it was the Arts and ecological awareness and they invited many many different wonderful people I was working on a curriculum which was how to bring ecological awareness to children in schools uh middle school and high school age children so youth um using movement and some dance we called it Eco moves for kids and that's what I presented um and I bring this up because before that time I had started to use the word EOS somatics and I didn't I wasn't aware of anybody else using it and then I found out my good friend Sylvia foren was also using the word and she was using it to talk about the Ecology of our culture of the somatic culture who are the people what are we thinking and how do we relate to one another and I leave it to her to or your reading of her vast literature uh to learn more about her use of the word EOS sematic I was being more literal I had read an article in um a dance Journal dance education journal the Journal of dance education from um the United States and I believe the article was by Rebecca anhauser and she called it ecool listening so it kind of relates to today and where we started and being on a podcast which asks us to listen um and I I loved it it was this idea that we're listening with our bodies that that's what somatics is all about being somatically aware is a kind of listening as well as feeling and yet I wanted when I heard the word Eco I was like oh but there's also this attuning with the Earth and all of its living beings so the plant life the trees the mushroom so much more information and movies and uh music music has developed from this whole field as well as all the animal kingdom and so much great writing on that as a matter of fact much more writing about animals as humans and humans as animals as well so one of the other uh projects I took on and it came out of France was I got an email from a person in France an Meridan happens to be an American but living in Paris saying would you write a chapter in a book on what they call childhood nature it's a one word and when I say they this was from a group of Scholars from Australia really looking at childhood as nature humanhood as nature and yet this particular book with uh spring ER Publishers was intended to really lift up what activities in education can be done that support children holding on to our connection as Animals As Natural beings so a true investigation of ecos sematics because for me ecos sematics is caring about the Earth and feeling our earthiness and our place as animals on the planet so uh I loved writing this article I loved doing EOS sematic work I love that the field has really grown and Jamie McHugh in particular has been running a kind of eosa um I'm going to call it uh it's not a podcast I believe it's a a a series of Zoom videos with different speakers on the topic so I'm so glad you're interested in that as well yeah yeah there are so many resources that you you pointed to and uh I've heard of yeah maybe two of them but not all of them and I'm very curious in diving more into the field because as you said is so vast and and opening up more and more as I guess maybe that's the bridge that I can see and and you'll tell me if this is the same for you but really the bridge between the individual and the collective and how maybe um somatic awareness can can leads to a more a vaster and deeper understanding of ourselves but also the need like biologically really that we have towards our environment and maybe somatic awareness facilitating this remembrance really that we are the planet and that the planet is made of us so that's very beautiful that we can jump from one way to the other absolutely abolutely um you bring up something that is so important the idea of individualism is really a western Consciousness concept and when I think of our collectivity in the sematic world like who are we as sematic experts and what are the different sematic disciplines and I'd love to get back to that later um I'm very aware that kind of the field developed at the turn of the 20th century and so there is this sense that some of these are new ideas and certainly the incorporation of maybe very precise anatomical concepts with exploration of the Soma the living body uh or working even with now now what has evolved the term neuroplasticity which really is something that just describes what people like Moshe felden Christ and um Mabel Todd and FM and gerder Alexander two separate Alexanders uh were doing they were bringing in neuroplasticity they were helping us move in order to grow new brain connections and maybe in some cases new brain cells so what I'm getting at here is that collectivism got lost not necessarily with sematics I think we were bringing it back although it's still done in a fairly individualistic way in some settings like private one-on-one settings um and maybe even in classroom settings where everybody's having their separate experience Guided by one or more teachers um that as I was deeply in this field and I'm thinking now this is around 1990s and I'd already been involved with the field for 20 years I'm like why is this so predominantly white bodied people what is going on here so one of the first things I did was start start to interview the people that I knew that had actually spent time in other continents and been influen them by them so people who had been influenced by them that then brought that influence into the form of somatic movement in particular that they had developed so for example Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen had lived in Japan and so her work in Japan highly influenced how she worked with bringing in one of the very first sematic systems to bring in the autonomic nervous system now everybody's involved with autonomic nervous system especially because of the work of Bessel Vander can really recognizing that the body and the nervous system are so important in healing I was running a class called calming the nervous system long before everybody everybody's doing these classes now but because in Body Mind centering we were working with really embodying our parasympathetic nervous system and as well as coming into a kind of confident sympathetic nervous system versus a fight flight anxious sympathetic nervous system I'll say one more story there and then come back to um the collective which is that uh with that work of playing with the the autonomic nervous system the part of our body that is automatic that we have a heartbeat that we have breath um with that we knew that yogis had already actually brought what was considered involuntary into voluntary control so it was so great to find out that Ida Ral really studied yoga and and that armgard banf also studied chigong so these were the the um influencers and the influences that I wrote about in an article on global sematics or the global influence on sematics I presented it at a conference Congress on research and dance in 2000 and then it was published so it was the beginning I feel of really recognizing the global South the African continent through the work of em Emily Conrad and Continuum and afri Nation influences all being really predecessors and influencers of these Western approaches and so now it's so beautiful because many of my students are saying you know my grandmother's Knowledge from Mexico or my grandfather's uh tradition of martial arts have taught me everything you're teaching me in sematics and I guess my my interest right now is to have each of those young people as well as the elders in their communities name if they were to do a Feldon Christ lesson or a um a body mind centering session or some kind of Trager work or Hanah sematics what do they find is different than what the shaman was doing in their in their area or that is built into the daily culture what I can say and this is coming back to our point is that they all would say we do this collectively and for the collective and that is still not happening in the sematic field fully it's beginning and I think the EOS sematic work is indeed the bridge that is where we recognize we are all together and also in another um area of sematic work which is called social sematics very much let's pay attention to the social Collective or the social impact of society's oppressive forces so social sematics is a term that came from Jill green out of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and that is the south of the United States where racism was rampant and she also had a feminist perspective really looking at women and Women's Health and how um unbalanced the lifestyle demands are the conditions of choice and decision making like you talked about before who has Authority in a situation and what kind of authority can we afford people through the practice of sematics if we're not thinking about the social constructs that are so oppressive so that brings us back to the collective definitely and so needed I think because you're bringing up like this uh biosocial um model really and biopsychosocial model that it really um changed uh to me like the the perspective like the tiny perspective that some field had and the other were having on their side and like not communicating like in the body like health is communication so how is that that we've kind of splitted um the the parts of the body and the systems themselves and and in BMC for example okay like we spend one week in the skeletal system we we kind of focus on it but we also remind ourself that it's it's not it's nothing alone like it cannot exist in and of itself it needs needs the rest so I'm always um yeah feeling like angry and sad like about how the global situation went into the splitted and uprooted really understanding of of humankind but also life on Earth and so I'm very uh grateful and um always like it brings hope back you know to myself like when I when I hear those conver conversations and and many many great projects that we don't hear about much uh sadly or maybe not yet I hope uh but especially in the in the yoga world because that's um mainly um my title quote unquote and my role even though I'm very sematic inspired but um yeah that like the individual and Collective as you said as a teacher who is teaching who have access to becoming a teacher who have access to the trainings and and who are the the students and yeah it's it's really profound and and culture provoking and thought provoking really so um I'm very um aware of those issues because to me they are issues and systemic issues and yet um where are the strategies sometimes you know it can feel very isolating as a job as well to be aware like on your own of those huge questionings and then like seeing um very individualistic oriented yoga classes or a Brands and I'm like whoa H where are we going so and and I know you've been there way uh way longer than I've been so I'm I'm very curious about your understanding of like the evolution of the yoga world or the somatic World in and of itself and and if you have any maybe Vision a shamanic vision of the future or any hope maybe absolutely wow that's so many different uh thoughts went through my head speaking I like to speak to social sematics I'd like to speak to the different branches of sematics I identified in my book mindful movement I'd like to speak to um holism and what has happened uh since just what's going on now yeah and example of how somatics is influencing other fields I just came from helping to organize a conference um I was just invited to organize one track of a conference called embodied cognition just happened two days ago at Yale Yale University in New Haven Mass St let me say that again just happened at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut outside of you know New York and it was a bringing together of psychiatrists psychologists uh physical educators dance Educators somatic Specialists of both somatic movement therapy and sematic movement education as well as I would say a lot of neuroscientists so for me it was profound to see many of these topics addressed in just one day in terms of what is going on for people with mental illness which is so rampant in our world what is going on for people that are veterans and survivors of Wars of having come back from fighting in various parts of our world and where is there what we used to call or and still call post-traumatic stress syndrome or disorder uh and how is it being addressed at all through the body so that conference um really addressed education it addressed Mental Health it addressed performance and just our AR history and and how coming into the body more fully also impacts um Aesthetics through dance through fencing through Sports uh that all came out and so I want to just take a moment and share from my book back to your talk um the idea of social sematics within the Health Arena because sematic movement I'm just reading this little section it's page 236 of one edition um somatic movement combines a mindful approach to movement it can be meditative in nature and uses imagery it has all the benefits of movement and exercise and includes an incredibly safe approach moving slowly with the teacher and student sharing my minute-by-minute feedback about their psychophysical experiences however as pointed out in Prior chapters somatic practices whether somatic movement education and therapy somatic psychology or somatic bodyw work when practiced separately from Physical Therapy Social Work Psychotherapy or massage therapy are often not part of the Allied medical profession for instance within a country's health insurance or their medical systems Health Equity asks that all of humanity should have equal access to life enhancing strategies this ideally includes the wellness impact of somatic experiences a component of social sematics is to work to counteract unequal access to health knowledge as well as to health practices a starting place is within some sematic education by making sematic sessions and sometimes sematic training more available to all it's a challenge to provide affordable ways to receive sematic sessions this goal is deterred further if one's cultural positions whether they're alternative or nonallopathic health care as a high priced commodity so if your culture positions these as a high price commodity this is further exacerbated in the US by a system where therapeutic sessions are limited to 15 to 30 minutes the implications of this go much further they relate to cost to time to space do we have access to clean space and to interpersonal processes so I feel like you talked about that access and this paragraph Just weaves in the idea of the importance of sematics but also how it's siloed how it's separated from the overall medical field so you can imagine this conference at Yale felt incredibly integrative and uplifting it's a hopeful piece it's bringing um a sense of a new possibility if we could change our medical system so that it includes more of this holism that would be a big step forward so encouraging really yeah and also to like remove guilt or shame from the individual's shoulders as well to remind ourselves that the systems aren't sustaining and supporting of our health in all levels and so it doesn't mean because we are um heal or we experience symptoms that it is our fault but or that we are not good enough or that we are lower than and and also there are truths that yes fragments of populations don't have the same access and it's not because of their worth it's because of the systems vision of their worth and that is so um needed to remember because well guilt and shame and any stagnant emotions are also a source of stress and stressors and so increasing the the illnesses themselves so you know it's a loop really and so I'm very uh grateful to hear about these kind of conferences and I'm sure they are plenty of them maybe more in the US than in France for now but still uh it's um it's growing and it's more visible and uh it's questionings that maybe because we are resourced a little bit more than before thanks to the work that like the one that you've done through the years that maybe we are ready now or at least curious about asking the those questions and willing to step by step and on our scale change some things so that's very encouraging and um yeah hopeful so thank you for sharing that yeah absolutely um we had three keynote speakers and one of them was Bess Bessel vandero who is the author of body keeps the score which is about 10 years old maybe a little older um and he really is staying very alive and vehement about one of the points that was made in his book about how all the research and data that they have on the different types of traumas and how PTSD does diagnosis which is a diagnosis in the United States that one can get treatment for now after much work um is not actually accurate for someone who is the victim if you want to use that word of um child abuse let's say or sex or someone who's uh a victim of sexual abuse and so they are have developed a Consortium of people of psychiatrists and psychologists and maybe some dance therapists I would think I would hope um have come forward with a new diagnosis but it was not accepted they thought it was too kind of complicated to explain what looked like a simple thing um and that was part of the response to the committee that uh we're not going to add it to our diagnostic manual which means that there are a whole group of people that aren't getting treatment in our medical system at least an appropriate treatment of one type that actually is effective that really understands the conditions of a person who's dealing with sustained abuse um and instead they have to have use different medical diagnoses to kind of patch together a program which if someone's not fully trained might not even know how to do so it's really a setback and so that is another place of potential hope is seeing these um understandings of first of all the body as being a place of retained trauma response and the need to bring in the somatic work whether it is through a psychotherapist trained in more somatic work or actually partnering with sematic movement Specialists who get much more movement going than the typical somatic psychologist who might just track breath and uh tension in the body in a more postural way which kind of leads us to yoga those are two of the beautiful places that yoga really helps right is getting into a posture and breathing into it so getting into a posture and really using the breath to change and open and reveal oneself through that posture but that's still different than the emotional expression that comes through movement through shaping in the Torso which is not something see aside from a total clo shape and a more upright shape in yoga is typical you know that we might curl over in child's pose um or we might twist with an upright spine or we might uh Arch the back and come into possibly uh the experience of elation of Happiness from that but very little Nuance changes of like postures of Shame postures of Ang postures of um of of confusion and again ultimately I strongly believe the posture is the held place but it's the movement through it that is so critical and I personally in my own form of Body Mind dancing which evolved out of my studies with irmgard banf and Bonnie Banbridge Cohen when I was teaching with both both of them it evolved even further but even prior to teaching in their certification programs the Labon movement analysis and the body mind centering certification programs I'm one of the few people in the world that taught in both programs over 10 years um and with the founders directly um basic I think I'm the only person that's done that for many years um basically there was such um a need to move from understanding posture to really understanding movement and these two systems are just brilliant ways of looking at movement in Dynamic embodiment I combine them so for instance the Labon movement analysis might describe the outer movement like ah this person is rising and widening with a sense of of um strength and and quickness and so which is different than rising and widening with ease and flow and sustain time so with those subtleties we're getting into a different emotional states you could rise and widen and then even Retreat and that would be the morrow reflex in its first phase of re kind of fight flight moving back into freeze or if you're doing it with ease it could be the beginning of just oh this is such a great day I am widening and I'm floating upwards so movement and the qualities of movement are tremendously important and I I you asked earlier about what is different uh between yoga and some of the sematic movement work and that would be a major difference for me and I think it's scary to people so I think yoga was really important as an entry point for people to come into the body if they knew nothing it's kind of safe I can hold this posture I can breathe into it I can open my body I can open my chakras which reminds me my other book together with Shak D Smith is dynamic embodiment of the sun salutation which is my personal practice since 1975 just to do the sun salutation in the morning and I so appreciate the flow from posture to posture but also the postures and the feeling of checking in as a kind of ritual how does my knee feel today in warrior pose how do I feel in my arms as I go into a plank let's say and then into the floor how am I feeling in my heart when I um begin and end the um the sun salutation so I'm going to pause there because that was a lot of different ideas and I'd love to see what direction you might want to go in in our final minutes yeah the the one that comes up strongly is that really the the shift um of intention and um how do we enter posture because we were talking about yoga as well um is that to achieve like an a result that most of the time isn't even uh offered by the student themselves but really like an external Authority like the teacher mostly so is it to do achieve model um control something or shape something or do we enter a posture with inquiry with curiosity with like an open heart mind whole body systems and and just savor it like is it comfortable is it not okay if it's not comfortable is there something else that we can add remove change uh remodel and readjust and really reclaiming the power as we said because um sometimes uh the settings can themselves kind of repeat and um encourage systemic oppressions even without being aware of them or naming them and I'm not blaming any teachers here because um unfortunately not yet maybe but uh in the trainings of yoga trauma is never really named or systemic oppression neither so it's it's quite difficult to step back and to question our own profession as well so it's it's very beautiful that you named and creating a created a book in in the sense allation kind of reshaping because it really is a tool that everyone in anyone can access to um maybe more uh easier than than you know attending to a class or and also it's kind confronting really to go to a class and to show ourselves to show up so yeah it's it's precious to have those tools and to to be aware of those very very intense and challenging and um and yet needed questionings so I'm very grateful that you've done such a big work and such a a very um kind of precise and yet white like that's the two objectives like The Duality the yeah the complimentarity that I see in your work like really precise and expert really and yet like so inquired and and curious and and wide So yeah thank you oh you're so welcome thank you for the appreciation because it is an attitude of being open-minded of and I think it was a gift that I received by virtue of the fact that in the same year that I was introduced to Labon movement analysis and armgard barten I was introduced to Bonnie Banbridge Cen so in the same moment I knew there were two brilliant people in the world so I didn't get caught in any kind of Guru kind of mentality yeah how could you you have two so it was it was a real gift right away because I saw many people even in the sematic field looking to their founder as a kind of authority and leader and this is the only system that works so I was very thankful to James that also refer to as Jim spyra who created our professional association bringing the different sematic systems together and that's also why I in my book both in mindful movement I talk about the amalgam generation so we those of us that studied different systems brought them together even Thomas Hannah would be one of them um as well as Peter LaVine I mean coming out of his own sematic movement work mov into Psychotherapy bridging from the three branches so we've got Bridges within somatic movement we've got Bridges across disciplines for instance in Dynamic embodiment we are definitely doing very refined touch work very skillful using BMC but also armguard barten's understanding of movement repatterning so that meant how do you guide people through space with shaping through through their torso in a sequence that flows and she taught that uh as part of her barenia fundamentals of movement so we've got in Dynamic embodiment these two types of somatic movement that both have incredible touch practices Body Mind centering working with how do you touch the autonomic nervous system and feel into its Rhythm how do you work with cranial sacral Rhythm through the cerebral spinal fluid and went on to study cranial sacral uh touch work as well as lymphatic drainage and massage for the blood flow um so my students are getting um a perspective of where they can go for more information but also models of touch that I call Dynamics of touch um that in are infusing and bringing in The BMC perspective of embodiment but also the touch practices that have been welldeveloped for specific body systems um related to that though coming back to the chakras and yoga and the beauty of what can open up in a posture is again starting from there starting from breath as does much sematic psychology and then partnering with those of us in particular that have gone on and are involved with dance so that's another feature of dynamic embodiment is that you don't have to be a dancer but everybody does dance as part of the training you don't have to choose to go to a lot of the dance classes but they're designed Body Mind dancing is designed for the lay public during covid people were coming to Body Mind dancing to do exactly what you were describing before which is to move the energy to go from Fear to go from isolation or loneliness into group activity to move from um exhaustion and Frozen States into Mobile expressive States and I have two models in um Dynamic embodiment that are explained in in Dynamic embodiment of the sun salutation just to see how to take the sun salutation and adapt it for different syndromes like exhaustion of the adrenal glands or not being able to sleep from the pineal or um adapting because the knees are hurting or a joint is you know achy and I work with cancer patients so it's not always just arthritis but arthritis caused by the treatment drugs for sustaining life so there are so many people that have joint pain so within the dynamic embodiment system we understand movement and touch we work work with individuals to observe and this is back to what you were saying what is it that motivates them what is it that they're bringing forward and how do we match that and this would be in a private session but we also do it in Body Mind dancing in the dance classes everybody speaks even if it's in a small breakout group first coming back with what do they feeling what is it you want and then the teacher facilitates even if they have a lesson plan or an idea of what movement they want to do they then Infuse it with the language and the intentionality of the student body the people that are coming together the clients so that people feel met and also are being met in where they are so this is coming from you know meeting people where they are which is something that has been the Baseline of Body Mind centering for over 50 years so I thank you for that for really recognizing and I speak about that a lot in mindful movement for me to be somatic is to follow the Soma the living body which means the agency is in the person and within that within the body part that's perhaps out of balance and also in the cells themselves the cells of the body are part of the self and and it is possible that because of trauma we have forgotten we have Frozen we have distorted experience and so the other piece of dynamic embodiment is that we have on our faculty people that are trained mental health workers and so they're teaching us to be trauma informed and they're teaching us what we can do as sematic movement Educators and therapists which is in dynamic embod we know how to help people regulate we know sometimes how to help them not because that's what we're trying to do because it just happens in a movement session which is I think why some people prefer yoga when you get into movement your trauma May reveal itself because you're moving through new places and then all of a sudden a certain position May remind you of a certain oppressive experience where whether it's a look in the eye or a a differential placing in space you know one person's below the other um any of those kinds of issues are critical and um need to be a the practitioner or teacher whether you're teaching groups or individuals needs to be aware that these things may come up in their sessions so I think I was one of the very first people to write about emotions as they come up in dance classes and that dance Educators need to be trained to be ready for that as our Dance Movement therapists who are then going to work with it psychodynamically we just need to be in our sematic movement World ready to be present and accepting of emotions not scared of them and then be able to refer people to the people to do deeper work but also to help regulate them so that they can be ready and I can't tell you how many sematic psychologists have turned to me to be on panels and at conferences in order to share more about the body because they really don't know as much as we do about the body definitely like regulating ourselves as facilitators and then therefore as you said we don't have to make it until you know fake it until it happens not at all like just because you are where you are centered then you just meet the other people where they are as well and they feel mirrored in their possibility to be regulated that's very beautiful and thank you Steven pores as well for the the polyal theory as well and that's that's very uh yeah eye openening and and beautiful that we can step into the biology and the psychology and the social context in which everything is wov them together and even the environmental context itself so that's layered and then one that's yoga right so so I'm very grateful and that's why I will link everything like your bio your website your books as well and the trainings as well in the show notes because I I really encourage the the audience to to to go check this out it's very important thank you so much for that yes we have classes if you just want a one hour class and that includes the ey work we started with as well as the dance and also workshops on the body like the shoulders or the gate or walking and how your knees are feeling but then we also have workshops that can be three hours or can be 12 hours and then we and many are prerequisites for joining the training program so it's a great way to get to know it and then the training program is is meta which is our professional association certified and it's both in person and and online right that's correct so we gather around the world in different places I'll be Prague I'll be in England I hope to be in Portugal and also possibly in Spain all in this coming fall yeah beautiful so closer to me that's good to know yeah even though we have technology and I'm super grateful that I could connect with you today because I've been following your work for years so it's been wellow such a yeah an honor so thank you so much for spending this hourish with me with us and sharing everything that you've done and that you're still very active into so thank you pretty much and and yeah talk soon thank you and have a great day and may we get outside and be more nature wherever we are inside or out yeah